[Shotwell] thumbnail update

[Adam Dingle]

Saturnino,

On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 8:53 PM, Saturnino Garcia <sat at elsaturnino.com>wrote:

> I recently bought a new computer and am in the process of transferring all
> my data to my new hard drive. I backed up my shotwell database (photo.db)
> and my photo directory.


Actually backing up photo.db is not sufficient for transferring to a new
hard drive, since Shotwell stores its thumbnails in the .shotwell directory
and you need those too (as you've discovered the hard way).  So the right
thing to do was to back up the entire ~/.shotwell directory, not just
photo.db.  See the section on backing up in the Shotwell FAQ (
http://trac.yorba.org/wiki/Shotwell/FAQ).


> When I open shotwell on my new computer, there are
> no thumbnails for the image (only gray boxes). The images show up fine in
> the single image view though (i.e. when I double click on one of them). Is
> there some way I can regenerate those thumbnails?
>

Unfortunately Shotwell cannot regenerate these thumbnails today, and I'm
sorry to say you may need to reimport your photos into a fresh Shotwell
library (losing any edits you've made) unless you have a backup copy of your
old .shotwell directory including the thumbnails.

There are a couple of changes we'd like to make to Shotwell to improve this
situation.  Ideally we'd like Shotwell to regenerate thumbnails if absent (
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2889), which would solve your problem
automatically.  Also, we're considering storing thumbnails in photo
directories rather than the .shotwell directory (
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2250), which would make it easier to back them
up along with photos themselves.

adam